And then she ran for the trees, each step making its own squelching sound, some of the puddles so deep they splashed into Dacey’s boots, turned Fiona’s toes to ice. It was less wet, but more treacherous underfoot once she made the woods. She kept running, but she wasn’t running away exactly. She wasn’t thinking that she would never go back, that she would leave Dacey or miss Christmas. She just needed to see if it was a little storm, a strange and little storm. She needed to know if she could run to where it wasn’t raining.
CAT HELLISEN
–
The Girls Who Go Below
WE PRACTICE DROWNING each other. It’s the best way to spend summer, by Vera’s lake (not Aunt Vera, she said. It made her feel old and she didn’t like to be reminded, thank you, girls) where the sun slants between the pale clouds like Zeus’s own fingers to stroke the ripplewaves and stir them up.
We love the way water lies to us. From Vera’s house it will look pewter-flat but as we tumble toward it, the water will shrug off its mirror face and turn amber and gold and brown and blue and filled with clouds and trees like a gateway to another world.
Here at the edges with our bare feet oozing into black and squishy cow-pat mud, the water will change again, grow red as sloe gin and suck at the roots of trees. It will be bottomless and filled with little fish-tremors, flicks of silver sides in the dark.
“This is the worst part,” says Millicent. “The getting in.” We sink, waiting for the right moment to slap forward into the froggy water, to where the big things live, all smooth and mysterious as monsters from the Jurassic oceans.
Vera says there are no monsters here, that the lake isn’t big enough to support one, herbivorous or carnivorous. That we are safe.
We find that sadly boring. We want monsters. That’s the fun of lakes and hollow black hills and forests deep and old as the bones of the Earth. They’re supposed to be the homes of things we can’t explain, otherwise what’s the use of them?
Our feet are growing cold, mud oozing between our toes. Millicent steps forward first, splashing black slime in a perfect arc across the front of my knees. I bound after her, shoving and catching hands, and we screech and crow, our voices the only things to break the fat, summer-sweaty silence of the lazy morning.
The water is best once we are far out, floating on our backs. We hold hands so we don’t drift apart. The lake is warm in patches, sun-heated, and every now and again we slip into a cold section, so surprisingly cold that it makes us believe we are not in a lake on a hillside farm under the looming Tsitsikamma mountains, but floating over nothingness, over an endless wellspring from which all things come. The damselflies skim past us, catching midges, oblivious to the monsters waiting yellow-eyed at our backs.
We drown in turns, holding each other under for longer and longer, counting out the seconds, waiting to see what will come first—the end of the countdown, or the manic flail that is our signal to stop drowning.
I’m gasping, head in the brightness, my eyes streaming with brackish tears, when Millicent stills next to me. Our legs and arms are entangled. We are as close as we’ve always been, but in that moment before she opens her mouth, I feel the snap that breaks us apart.
“Lucienne,” she whispers, hot in my ear, making me shiver. “Who’s that?”
We turn together, feet gently swirling, our bodies in layers of cold and warm and dark and amber, our hair serpenting around our throats, diamonds and rainbows in our eyelashes.
There is an invader on our bank, cross-legged calm, watching us from under the white milkwood. He raises one hand.
We do not.
“We don’t like him,” I say.
“Yes we do, Lucy,” Milly tells me. “He might be interesting.”
*
“Oh.” Milly lies on her bed, knees up, the pillow clutched in her arms like a lover. “We should invite him next time we go swimming.”
I scowl. Vera says that he is the son of one of the neighboring farmers, that he has been away at Rhodes University, studying “some arty rubbish.” He has a name. Mallery. I think it is a foolish name, reminding me too much of Great Uncle Milo, but Millicent adores it. “Millicent and Mallery, isn’t that hilarious?” she says.
The years between us never felt big, but Mallery is like a wooden peg driven into a split pine. We are being pushed apart.
I wait for Milly to fall asleep before I creep out of the house and tumble like a blackguard through carrot ferns and Cape ivy, down the moonlit paths where the stones are bright as plucked-out eyes reflecting the stars.
The farm is not far, though no self-respecting English girl would travel there alone in the dark. Vera pointed it out to us when we—when Millicent—asked, and even in the dark the way is easy, my feet leading me sure as can be. Only when I reach the farmhouse door and see between the curtains that blue ghostly flicker of the television, hear the laughter, and taste sour peat in the air, do I think perhaps I am the one being foolish.
After all, Mallery is just a boy. Millicent has seen boys before, has drawn their initials in her diary and trapped them in closed-circuit hearts. I know all these things. I don’t need to keep a diary. Milly’s is enough for me.
So why am I upset by Mallery’s coffee-ground eyes and the curling snare of his hair? Do I think that perhaps this time it is Millicent in danger of being caught, and not the other way around? Milly always lets them go, after all.
I wait on the wide farm stoop, wondering. Night has fallen with a cold wind, and I am dressed only in my nightdress and summer gown, my feet bare. Just as I’m about to turn and go back to my sister and to sleep, the door opens, and the boy intruder is staring at me, frowning.
“Hi,” he says, confusion all slow and sweet on his tongue. “You’re one of the Stephenson girls.”
I stare at him.
“From the lake. Vera Notley’s nieces, am I right?”
“No.” I hold my head straight and high. “You’re wrong. And stay away from our lake. And from us.”
He calls out after me as I leave. “Wait.” His feet thud soft, like a hunting dog, and then he is beside me. I pretend to ignore him. “It’s not your lake,” he says, huffing as he walks. I have long legs, a quick stride, I am sure-footed in the dark. “It’s public land.”
“I don’t care what you think,” I tell him. “You are invading our privacy.”
He stops, and I turn to look back at him against my better judgment. “Ah, is that it.”
“Is what it?”
“Nothing.” He smiles at me, white fangs under the fat moon, and he raises his hand again. It’s not a greeting, or a goodbye. He is saluting me. “Challenge accepted.”
“There’s no challenge—” But he is gone. I blink, and after a moment, go back to Vera’s grand old wooden house, to my bed and my dreams. But it’s impossible to fall asleep. My feet are burning as though I walked through a field of crushed glass, and the feeling works its way up my legs and my belly and the hollow space meant for my heart, and the dreams I do have are hot and sharp like bottles broken at the edge of a fire.
*
It rains for three days and we use the time to practice our music. Mother has always pointed out that we are English ladies, and we shall have a Classical education and know our Heras from our Aphrodites, and play an instrument, and walk very prettily. I think she plans for us to go back to England, though I do not know how we can return to a place we have never been. Milly sings, trilling up and down scales, holding her position just so, while I play a dutiful piano accompaniment. My technique is very good, very precise. Our old teacher used to tell us that I was all slick perfection with no heart, which we thought was a terribly stupid thing to say. A piano is wires and wood and dull teeth. There’s no place in machines for wet lumps of meat.
Milly bounces through our song, every crotchet and quaver, while the rain veils the hills, makes a thick curtain of moving dark and light across the glass. We perform for Vera, who drinks a port like watered blood and claps in delight when we are don
e. Milly smiles small, acknowledging her talent, and presses one hand to her neck, her fingertips just touching her earlobe. She’s wound her golden hair up like an adult, but there are still streaks of sun-bleached white and those are not grownup at all. Grownups do not play in the sun and pretend to drown their sisters.
We neither of us mention Mallery. Instead, we sing along to old swing records that buzz and crackle and jump on Vera’s turntable, we take over the front parlor with a world map puzzle that is longer and wider than both of us. There are whales spouting in the oceans, and tigers prowling through India. It is lovely. It smells of cardboard. A sweet nutty smell like something might grow from it if we were to water the world.
But soon the sun is back, scattering butterfly-white wings across the rolling greens, and everything is perfumed damp and sweet and clean and when Milly kicks my feet and says, “We can’t stay inside all day,” I know that we are going back to the sloe gin lake.
There’s no sign of Mallery by the shore, and perhaps this is good, he has understood he cannot take my sister from me. It’s only when we are waist-deep in the water and spinning each other in circles, hands clasped, fingers tight and white, that we hear the sobbing.
Sweet and high, it throbs across the water and we still, the water hushing around us, pushing and lapping. We rock in place.
“What’s that?”
I twist my mouth in annoyance. It’s not as though we have never heard a violin before.
The music rises out of the tree line that stands a little distant from the lake. From the milkwood and yellowwood forest that crawls up the slopes, draping them in rustling shivery green.
“We should ignore it,” I say. “Or go home.”
Milly pulls her hands out of mine and wades to shore.
After a moment, I unstick my feet from the grabbing mud and follow her, the silt from her steps clouding around me, swirling like underwater storms. Something slides underfoot, eel-fast, and is gone.
Mallery is standing in the shadows of the ancient trees, his violin tucked under his chin. He doesn’t even look at us until he has finished playing, then he lowers his instrument and stares at us like he has called us here, little water beasts entranced by Orpheus’s lyre.
Millicent hasn’t bothered to throw a towel around herself, and the breeze has teased her cold. She stands, dripping and smiling, her sun-white streaks as bright as her teeth, her skin pale gold, like a palomino kelpie. I tuck my borrowed olive-green towel over my swimsuit and keep my distance. My skin has also been sun-dusted, but I a-m like our mother, and like her, a shadow behind the sun.
“Mallery!” Milly smiles for him, waves. “That was beautiful. Aunt Vera—”
“Just Vera,” I say.
“—Vera says you’re from—” She pauses to shake topaz from her hair. “Delchik Farm.” She unleashes her first weapon and smiles quickly, just once.
I sigh and roll my eyes.
“And that you’re at Rhodes—is that what you’re studying—music?”
“It’s a hobby,” he says. “Are you enjoying the lake?”
“Oh, yes. It’s lovely, simply beautiful here.” She turns to look back at me, wriggles her fingers, beckoning. “This is my sister Lucy—”
“Lucienne.”
Her smile doesn’t falter. “And I’m Millicent, but god, that is such a dreadful name, so I insist you call me Mill.”
“Mill.” He nods in greeting, and then to me, because we have never met. One time in the dark doesn’t count. “Lucienne.” Mallery holds his violin before him like a lovely breakable shield, and the fragile javelin of his bow dangles from his fingers. “I’m actually here to deliver a message.”
Millicent—Mill—lets herself frown just the slightest. “A message. For us?”
“You’re invited to dinner,” he says. “Tonight, if that suits. You and your aunt.”
We make plans—Millicent makes plans while I watch, and Mallery gets caught on the hooks of her fingers, tangled in the bleached-white web of her drying hair. Even though there is a space between them, I can already see the ghost of it happening.
*
“It’s not really suitable, dears,” says Vera when we tell her about the invitation. Her eyes are cloudy, worried.
“Oh, but why, it’s perfectly respectable—you’re going with us, after all,” Milly says, a pout waiting to form. I know the tiniest twitches of her mouth, what each one means.
“It’s not about that.” Vera frowns. “The Delchiks are a strange lot.” She means unsuitable. Mother wants us to marry well, or not at all, like Dearest Aunty Vera.
“Isn’t everyone out in the country?” Milly waves her insult away almost as soon as she says it. “Not you, of course, Vera dearest, but most of them.”
“They are not—” She sighs. “Fine. It’s all just rumor, anyway.”
I’m intrigued now, for the first time. I look up from the terrible sampler I’ve been mangling. “What rumors?”
“Oh, nonsense stuff, that the Delchiks have fairy blood, witch blood. That they can trick a person out of their money and land and mind—it’s supposedly why they have the nicest bit of farmland in the whole area. Nonsense, of course. You’re right. Utter country rubbish, fueled no doubt by jealousy.” She smiles too brightly. “We’ll need to find you something to wear, Millicent. Those dresses of yours are getting outgrown.”
*
Dinner is dark, filled with meat and wine. I am allowed a glass; Vera says sixteen is a perfectly acceptable age to begin the path to alcoholism, and Mallery fills my glass with tarry red wine from Franschhoek that I have to sip at and pretend to like. Millicent drinks as though she was born to it, and for the first time I wonder how much of my sister I don’t know. Her thin fingers are tight around the stem of the glass, waiting to break it, like it’s a rose she wants to take home and press between family Bibles.
Vera insists Milly sing after dinner and Mallery’s parents, who look as normal and unwitchy as is possible, are eager to hear my sister’s famous voice. We are settled before the piano, Milly resting one hand on my shoulder so that we strike the perfect tableau: her in a burgundy dress I have never seen before, myself in my forest-green Sunday velvet, my brown hair pulled back into a child’s ponytail. We are only a few measures into the piece when the violin sweeps in soft and slow, and Milly’s voice soars with it. I strike an off note, and the sound of it reverberates in my head, drowning out the rest of the music.
Milly’s fingers dig into my shoulder.
“You were off tonight,” she says afterwards.
“I need fresh air. The wine.” I leave her alone with the Delchiks and Vera, and step out onto the wide stoop, trying to breathe deep and catch again the feel of Milly and me perfectly in time and in tune. It’s fading. A dream. Unreal.
The air here is pine-tinged, sharp as shards of falling mirrors, and I take in lungfuls of it, wondering why it feels like I can’t remember how to breathe. The front door clicks, and I hang on to the stoop rail and wish I could grow into the smooth dead wood. I do not want to talk to anyone now.
“She’s very good,” says Mallery.
“Go away.”
“So are you.”
“But I have no heart,” I finish for him.
He moves behind me, shadow-slipping over the wood boards. From the forests, the bushpigs squeal. “I wouldn’t say that.”
That makes me turn. “I have always been told I have no heart.”
Mallery shrugs. He’s lit a hand-rolled white cigarette and the bright cherry of it sweeps through the dark, a little fire fairy. “Maybe you hid it so it could never be broken.”
I laugh. “No.”
But he carries on, and I might as well not have spoken. “You cut out your heart and hid it inside a …inside a little girl’s music box—the type that plays a terrible plinking tune and spins a pink ballerina when it opens.”
Milly has a box like that. I do not. But I listen.
“Then you took the box and hid
it inside a shoebox filled with the love letters of people long dead, and placed that inside a lead-lined chest, and locked it with thirty locks, before rowing out to the middle of the lake and dropping it overboard, where it sank to a place no one could ever reach.” He sucks on his flat cigarette and blows out snaky smoke, then grins. “How did I do?”
“Awfully,” I tell him. “There were thirty-one locks.” I leave him, run back to my sister.
*
“Mallery makes his own violins,” Milly tells me. “Can you believe that?”
“I don’t care.” I put a missing piece into Siberia and pick up another. I have been saving all the palest puzzle pieces for last, like icing on a cake.
It is not raining, but we are not swimming. Milly is waiting for Mallery to come fetch her—he’s driving her into town so she can do some shopping. She wants a new dress. I’m invited but I do not want to go. “Go drive with idiot Mallery and the two of you can shop all day. I don’t care.”
Milly flicks the piece out of my hand. “You are in a beastly mood, Lucy. Beastly. I don’t know what’s gotten into you.” She uncurls, stands, smooths her beautiful skirt down. “Well, I’m going. Don’t say I didn’t ask you.”
After she’s gone, I take my towel down to the lake and practice drowning myself. It’s not as much fun. I let out slow, silvery streams of bubbles and try to tell my future in their constellations. Nothing. I dive for my heart, fingers combing through years of settled mud, but all I do is cloud the water and scare the frogs and leave the water filthier than when I got in. I have to shower twice to get the stickiness off my skin.
Vera has gone with Milly and Mallery, and I drift through her empty, lonely house, peering under the claw-footed furniture.
It is full of places to hide a heart, but I cannot find mine anywhere.
*
The first night Mallery visits me, Milly is asleep, snoring softly against the pillow she holds as close to her as she used to hold me. He comes to my window and I open it against my better judgment. He sits on the ledge and grins, legs swinging.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 10